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The debate on the EU's legitimacy has long suffered from a number
of serious misunderstandings. Supranational politics, Jurgen Neyer
argues, is not about the making of public order in Europe but about
internalizing external effects and fostering the individual right
to justification. The concepts of 'state' and 'democracy', he
suggests, are essentially useless for understanding and justifying
the EU's structures and practices. The European Union is a
dualistic polity that is not replacing but supplementing its member
states. Its modus of operation is the joint exercise of pooled
competencies on the normative basis of the principle of mutual
recognition. He goes on to show that the EU provides an important
cure to many of the problems that modern democracies are facing in
a globalizing world. Legal integration internalizes external
effects and democratizes democracies by transforming strategic
international bargaining into a justificatory transnational
discourse. The EU promotes the cause of justice by providing an
effective remedy to horizontal and vertical power asymmetries, and
to the arbitrariness of untamed anarchy. The EU is far from
perfect, however. European politics is still deeply embedded in a
culture of integration by stealth and closely connected to a deep
mistrust in the capacity of ordinary citizens to understand
politics. A major change in the constitutional set up of the EU is
required. It should build on a new understanding of the EU's
institutions as catering to the individual right to justification
and give national parliaments a strategic role in further
developing its constitutional design.
Debate about the theory underpinning the nature, workings, and
development of the European (EU) has in many ways been hampered in
recent years by an intellectual divergence in the two main ways
that the EU is conceptualized. On the one hand is a political
science and comparative government oriented strand that sees the EU
as a political system in its own right. On the other is the
international relations tradition which conceptualizes it as
another international organization. Alongside this, the EU itself
has developed a significant constitutional dimension. Indeed, the
debate surrounding the 'Constitutional Treaty' presented several
challenges to our capacity to grasp the normative change of this
non-state polity. Despite the eventual contestation of the EU's
'constitutional turn' through the French and Dutch no-votes and the
cumbersome procedure of ratifying the Lisbon Treaty in their
aftermath, debates about the EU's constitutional quality have not
ceased. In the light of these developments, the editors of this
volume, along with their distinguished contributors, have attempted
to create a more decisively interdisciplinary theoretical approach
to studying the EU within the wider world-political context. The
volume brings together scholars in a range of disciplines across
the social sciences to offer, not a complete theory, but rather a
theoretical approach combining different stands of political and
legal theory. The book's aim is to inspire further engagement with
the central tenets of political authority and world order,
sovereignty and constitutional change and democracy and justice, in
the context of the EU's political development.
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